Classes, Curses, and Canadian Thanksgiving

A new week. Well it's now Wednesday but it's been quite an interesting week already. This is the first full week of classes since last week we had a holiday on Monday and whatever. This first kind of odd thing about these classes are that they want us to fill out little i.d. cards and put like a passpost size photo of ourselves on them, 1. that is pretty weird, why not just have an attendance sheet, and 2. it's a nuisance trying to find somewhere to either get passport sized photos taken or somewhere with a printer to print tiny bad-quality black-and-white photos of yourself. UBC has a good system with a class list with our student photos on them, then again we have actual i.d. cards there and not pieces of paper with a passport sized photo glue sticked to it. Anywho, I still need to actually get photos printed from somewhere, that's a friday task.

Classes have been pretty interesting so far, my teachers are all a little crazy which is always entertaining, they've got that sassy Spanish attitude, well some of the woman do, the male profs just like to joke around and all seem to have their own kind of quirks. Apparently one of the Art History profs just breaks out into random song sometimes and is actually a decent Opera singer, who would've guessed eh. My spanish grammar prof, who's name is África btw, is a small woman who is intimidating as hell and very sarcastic, love her and fear her at the same time. She's one of those profs who will just randomly call out your name and ask you a random question about whatever, she also calls me Canada which I find hilarious, although having such a nickname makes it easier for her to call on me..eek.

There's also a bit of a teachers strike going on at the CLM (and probably all of UGR). Because of the economy, the profs have gotten a pay cut but their hours have been extended, as a result, at least at the CLM, on both Monday and Wednesday during my spanish conversational class my prof (who's an adorable petite woman with puffy, curly hair and glasses) left for 15minutes to stand in the courtyard with all the other profs and protest with signs. It's a pretty odd thing to watch, I feel bad for them, the economy here has gone to shit this past year, Granada is holding up alright in general but the country has definitely been suffering as a whole. Apparently there's student strike going at the main UGR campus so they may not have classes tomorrow, I don't know, everything around here has a sense of underlying political problems. It's a crazy system.

My Italian teacher is also a bit of a crazy lady, she's from Milan, has long blonde hair and exaggerated expressions, she's Great. So far she's mostly taught us expressions, swear words, and well some actual technical things like past tenses but yeah, it's definitely been an interesting class so far. In that class there's two girls from Granada which is kind of awesome, finally a class that isn't all Americans! Aha, this is the Hilarious video we watched last class that 'explains' italian hand gestures:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVCuyrPk7P4

Anyhow, this past weekend was of course, Canadian Thanksgiving but since most of us were out of the city at some point this weekend we decided to have our Thanksgiving dinner on Monday instead. We being me, 3 other UBC-ers, another girl in the CLM program from Toronto, and my roomie. Of course being in Spain, it was a little challenging to have a 'traditional' Thanksgiving dinner so we just made the best of what we could find, it was like Thanksgiving Spanish-Style aha. It turned out pretty awesome though! We had chicken with carrots and green beans, asparagus, fresh bread, and of course, 3 bottles of red wine. With some chocolatey ice cream cake thing for dessert. Aha, weird meal but an excellent Canadian Thanksgiving Spanish-Style dinner I would say.

Dinner is Served...minus the plate of asparagus

Great company, Great food, Great night!

Oct. 8-12